Publisher: Beogradski krug

The Gulag Survivor – Beyond the Soviet System is the first book published in Ex-Yugoslavia to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalins victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding their existence evolved from the 1950s to the present.

I am very pleased that this collection of my papers, edited by Obrad Savic, is appearing in Belgrade. Work of this kind positively calls out for translation and publication in a new context. I hope that the fact that I come at familiar questions from an unfamiliar angle might be helpful to some readers. And even more, I hope that the reactions to and criticisms of this highly partial work will eventually help me to think about these matters more effectively. I think of this publication as one move in an ongoing exchange, which I hope we will one day be able to continue through meetings and other publications. I am of course aware of the difficult times and struggles which Serbian society is now going through, and I know that the experience of those who are working there for democracy and human rights, however dismaying to them, will have something to say to all of us. (Charles Taylor, Introduction)

Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyzes and performs certain questions about the body as an “artificial” construction. The book deals with the mechanical in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic – in order to demonstrate to what extent a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, it finds an artistic or cultural pretext for each of its expositions – a line from Virgil, a painting by Conder, a theory by Freud, a film by Greenaway, a text by Derrida, novels by Roussel or Gibson, a sixteenth-century rhetoric – that connects thematically or theoretically with the question of prosthesis.

Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin’s discussion of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entirely trajectory of his writings, including the historical and political consequences of technology, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning.

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation’s dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. The author argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the current internal predicaments of the European Community or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.

In this book, author turns detective in order to investigate a crime considering the ¨murder¨ of Reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the technological and social processes by which our world is becoming a thing of (empty) transparency and visibility, a place where reality, swamped by the ¨real time¨ of the news media, has quite simply vanished. But author is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as ¨the most important event of modern history¨, nor even to meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crime is also the work of a great moralist: it is a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the ¨advanced democracies¨ in the (very) late twentieth century.

In The Location of Culture, Hommi Bhabha sets out the conceptual imperative and political consistency of the post-colonial intellectual project. In a dazzling series of essays he explains why the culture of western modernity must be relocated from the post-colonial perspective. Bhabha discusses writers as Morrison, Gordimer, Conrad and Walcolt. And Bhabha rethinks questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation. In doing so he provides a theory of cultural hybridity and the ‘translation’ of social differences which goes beyond the polarities of Self and Other, East and West.

»The Construction of mass utopia was the dream of the twentieth century. It was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization in both its capitalist and socialist forms. The dream was itself an immense material power that transformed the natural world, investing industrially produced objects and built environments with collective, political desire.«
(From the Preface)

Martin McQuillan brings Derrida's writing into the immediate vicinity of geo-politics today, from the Kosovo conflict to the Iraq war, following both Derrida's writing since Specters of Marx and the present political scene through the former Yogoslavia and Afghanistan to Palestine and Baghdad. His 'textual activism' is as impatient with the universal gestures of philosophy as it is with the complacency and reductionism of policy-makers and activists alike. This work records a response to the war on thinking that has marked western discourse since 9/11

Here Sloterdijk analyzes some of the basic concepts of political philosophy. These are: origin of culture, and cultural conflicts in contemporary societies; the status of community, emergence of the people, of nation and nationalism, problem of the masses; question of humanism, etc. Entire analysis is carried out, as the author puts it, from the standpoint of “hyperpolitics”.

The inclusion of literary study is a distinctive trait of the modern, scientific university. But this legitimation of a ¨division of literature¨ has been from the beginning a tenuous, ambivalent, and divisive affair. Why and what effect? These questions guide Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university and orient her critical reading of developments from the French Revolution through the nineteenth century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon – Melville's The Confindence- Men – to show academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past. By enganging a future readership to which it applies for credit, Kamuf argues, literature cannot serve as a stable object of study. It locates, rather, a site of ¨the university in deconstruction¨.

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century. This collection examines the themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism, revolution as a ‘new beginning’, conception of freedom, responsibility, guilty, and her controversial idea of the ‘banality of evil’. Each chapter examines the political, philosophical, and historical concerns which shaped Arendt’s thought, and which promoted her to become one of the most unapologetic champions of the modern political life in the Western traditions.

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